Conscious “Uncoupling”: How to Have (and Get Through) a Healthy Breakup

Just because a relationship ends, it doesn’t mean it’s over. When we take a lover, it’s as though we breathe this person into the very center of our soul, inviting them to take up residence and root down within us.

In the bloom of romance, this joining can be one of the most beautiful experiences we’ve ever had. You and your partner may begin thinking one another’s thoughts, sensing one another’s feelings, merging your worldviews, and assimilating each other’s preferences and rhythms as though they are your own. Becoming, as the Good Book says, “one flesh.”

Excavating your former love from the inner landscape of your psyche can be an excruciating task. If you have ever tried to untangle badly matted hair, you might begin to understand working through grief.

The Death Of Love

Even when the external breakup is quick, the inner one rarely is. It’s no wonder then that we’ll often try to shortchange the grief process by allowing anger to take over.

In an attempt to emotionally disconnect and avoid the pangs of sorrow, we may allow anger to consume us. It quickly moves us from a “soul mate” to a “soul hate” connection faster than we can say the words, “Let’s just be friends.”

At first, hating your former love seems like a good idea because it can help you detach from him or her. If you ever hope to have a happy, healthy future love, you need to learn how to disconnect healthily.

Your next relationship won’t begin when you meet your next partner, but when you’ve dealt with your previous one.

And besides, inside the blinding rage and festering resentments, you risk doing a tremendous amount of damage to yourself and others, as well as steal the energies you need navigate this ending in a way that will allow you to reclaim our power, and reinvent your life to be even better than it was before.

The feelings that can come up during a breakup are so big that they can be really hard to navigate without getting into trouble. Big rage, hurt, hopelessness, powerlessness, desire for revenge – all threatening to overwhelm us. They can cause us to behave in ways that are completely outside of who we want to be.

In the midst of these feelings, we can suddenly find ourselves out of control, saying all sorts of horrible, undermining and nasty things that we never thought we’d say, and doing and all sorts of heinous, monstrous things we’d never thought we’d do.

After all, hurt people hurt people.

How To Move Past The Hurt

We can learn how to hold and harness the energy of these difficult, big emotions. We can transform them from the energy of destruction and into the energy of change. This can serve as a powerful catalyst for us to take a huge leap in our own growth and development.

We can learn to use all of the energy to empower us to graduate forever from our old hurtful and disappointing patterns in love. You can honor this loss by harnessing the opportunities for growth it inherently holds.

In other words, if navigated wisely, you can learn through this suffering how you can ensure that you never, ever, EVER have to go through this again.

The Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, wisely says that “anger is the garbage of all emotion, but it takes garbage to make compost, and it takes compost to make a flower.” Every difficult emotion has underneath it, a beautiful gift waiting for you to discover it.

So, if you find yourself indignant and enraged at how poorly you’ve been treated, celebrate that anger and see it as the part of you that is waking up! Relate to it as the part of you that is compelling you to stand for your right to be treated with honor, love, and respect from this moment forward.

Learn to nurture this very healthy impulse underneath your anger and to sponsor that impulse into the light of day by committing yourself wholeheartedly to that which is seeking to evolve and be liberated within you.

Katherine Woodward Thomas, M.A., MFT, is author of the national bestseller, Calling in “The One”, and dedicated to evolving love and conscious relationship for all living beings. A life coach and licensed psychotherapist, Katherine teaches regularly at prestigious learning communities such as Esalen, Kripalu and the Omega. Register for her free online class, "How to Identify and Release Your Hidden Barriers to Love" at her Website.